1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to peeling devices for use in removing the tail meat from a crustacean such as a crawfish wherein a lance penetrates the exoskeleton and fluid under pressure flows from a tool body through the lance into the crawfish exoskeleton interior, forcing the meat therefrom and wherein the lance has a conduit for channeling fluid under pressure from the tool body to the interior of the crawfish exoskeleton while the lance occupies a position at the aperture in the exoskeleton.
2. General Background
A small crustacean which is very popular in the southeastern and some parts of the southwest United States known as the crawfish is used in many food delicacies such as crawfish bisque, crawfish etouffe, crawfish stew, fried crawfish tails and many others. In the metropolitan cities of New Orleans, La. and Houston, Tex. as well as all of the surrounding communities, these crawfish dishes have become immensely popular.
Crawfish are becoming an ever growing popular food item in other parts of the United States as well as in foreign markets. The crawfish appears in pictures and in photographs to resemble a lobster. However, it is a much different animal, being many many times smaller. Thus, the hand peeling method typically associated with lobsters becomes very time consuming and labor intensive when applied to crawfish because the yield is so small for the time invested. For this reason, crawfish have continued to be very expensive when commercialized in processed, picked form which necessarily is by hand. This hampers the industry of crawfish farming, raises prices to the consumer, and generally stifles the growth of the crawfish farming industry.
Several devices have been patented which have attempted to solve the problem of picking or peeling the exoskeleton of a crawfish in order to harvest the tail meat portion which is the only sizable meat product in the crawfish worth commercializing. The claws are on the order of one half inch (1/2") long and contain very little meat product, a minuscule amount if commercialization is required.
The following list of patents relates to devices for peeling crawfish and other crustacea, some of which employ air under pressure as part of the peeling process.
______________________________________ U.S. PAT. NO. TITLE ISSUE DATE ______________________________________ 2,660,754 Crayfish Picking Machine 12/01/53 3,221,363 Process for Removing the 12/07/65 Edible Meats From Crustacea Tails 3,758,921 Crawfish Peeler 09/18/73 3,871,086 Apparatus for De-Shelling 03/18/75 Crustaceans 4,121,322 Crustacean Meat Extraction 10/24/78 Means 4,196,495 Crawfish Tail Peeler 04/08/80 4,385,422 Crayfish Peeler 05/31/83 ______________________________________
These above devices are all relatively complicated requiring extensive machinery and the maintenance and downtime as well as expense that is associated with such complicated machinery.
The present invention provides a simple yet highly efficient method and apparatus for peeling crawfish wherein a tool body having a fluid conveying bore is used to route fluid under pressure through a lance into the crawfish exoskeleton so that the meat product is literally thrown from the exoskeleton in a projectile fashion.